Again, as a disclaimer, I'm not trying to proselytize as such nor debate for sport here; so I implore to extend your understanding if I seem to rhetorically overstep my bounds.
what remained of your tumor has disappeared...Doctors stated he'd be dead by the age of 20 at the most. He's now happily married at 37 years of age...
At the risk of sounding deliberately offensive and/or belligerent, I was wondering, as I read the first two of these 'miraculous' accounts, whether you've considered the possibility that these admittedly sensational cases are simply reflective of two very real, well-documented, but nevertheless easily overlooked and widely misunderstood facts of life, one pertaining exclusively to modern medicine - the phenomenon of
clinical error; the other involving all kinds of causally determined events - the concept of
correlation and the questionable cause; Please permit me a couple narratives of my own:
1)
Medical Error My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer at ~60 years of age. His prognosis was declared fair-to-optimistic by his oncologist at Johns Hopkins (which choice of institution makes me feel reasonably safe in assuming that he was not under the care of a quack). After a handful of surgeries and multiple rounds of chemo (including a last-ditch treatment which was, at the time, experimental, later approved by dint of its efficacy) he died an excruciatingly painful, utterly ruinous death a mere two years later. Who do you think was to blame? Yahweh? I'll come back to Him. His clinicians? Perhaps, but in all probability, any error on their part was likely to be found in the original prognosis, not the treatment protocols. Or was it just the frequently arcane, stochastic nature of human pathologies that really got him in the end?
My overall impression when reading these two stories isn't one of rapturous awe and dumbfoundedness in the face of miraculous (i.e. utterly implausible by currently accepted standards) intervention, but rather of a simple heathen's condolences for you and your family, and a certain bittersweet comfort in the awareness that these sorts of regrettable things really do sometimes happen, for a multitude of non-supernatural reasons, foremost of which I suspect to be simple human error and the strangeness of human biology, much of which remains poorly understood.
my mother...received a call from another friend of the family...immediately start praying because today is the day that I'm gonna die. Soon after (that same day), I overdosed...but survived.
2)
Correlation In the fifth grade, I was assigned a class project that involved the assimilation of large quantities (for a fifth grader) of information to be contributed to my group's overall project which was more expansive in scope. This project was to contribute to a substantial portion of my overall grade in the class, which grade already left something to be desired - an oddity for me. As I'm sure you can understand, I was seized by terror the night before the project was due when I realized that the entire enterprise had completely slipped my mind for the past two weeks that I'd been given to complete it. Being a distraught child with a religious grandmother who made sure to expose me regularly to her beliefs, I decided, ever the swindler, "Fuck it, I'll pray; God, if you grant my wish/answer my prayer, I'll do X, Y, and Z and love you forever," or something to that effect. So I prayed. The next day, my teacher regretfully informed us all that we would not be presenting the projects that day, because an important guest speaker had, at the very last minute, been squeezed into the roster. It was a Friday. So, fortuitously, I gained an entire weekend to complete my assigned task, in which time I accomplished such, and received a B. As a ten-year-old, I understandably walked away from this scenario with my mind buzzing over its potential theological implications. But now, as an adult, I look back upon this story not as a proof nor an argument for anything more or less than the twee mechanisms by which a typical child's mind works under pressure. As far as I can tell, the takeaway here is this: What do you think was the ultimate cause of my fortuitous break? Perhaps it was Yahweh. Or maybe, one time in many, some people just get lucky.
Regarding the Book of the Law:
and that if you're looking for something in the Bible to guide you in the choices you make in your life, the lifestyle you should live; look no further than the Ten Commandments - With the first being "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
Religious people often appeal to the Ten Commandments as though these strictures possess some transcendent moral wisdom (irrespective of their origin) far above and beyond what any mortal with a conscience could possibly drum up on a lazy afternoon. However, I'm afraid that I'm not nearly as smitten by these injunctions as are you. Where are the straightforward, baldfaced proscriptions against torture? Democide? Rape? Child molestation? Spousal abuse? Blackmail? There are arguably many, many more terrible (or at least comparably awful) acts that I could inflict upon another human being than killing them, lying to them, stealing from them, or coveting their respective ox or ass. And, when considered this way, don't these supposed moral absolutes seem suspiciously crude, if not downright babyish, to have been decreed by the supreme mover Himself? If, by most people's lights, even sinful, mortal PA could fathom an intuitively better (i.e., more complete, more resonant with past experience/gut feeling) moral code, what does this tell you about the true origins of the rules by which you claim to live? Indeed, if such a thought process presented some serious discomfort, one could always fall back on the whole 'mysterious ways, He knows better than you' schtick. But I'm sure you can see how hopelessly circular such a line of reasoning will quickly become.
The final straw for me, as a 12-13-year-old pre-adolescent trying to find some sort of bedrock upon which to predicate my worldview, was, after all the abstract reasoning regarding ontological 'evidence' and theodicy, the bluntly facile question of whether, in the final dispassionate analysis, what I was reading (New Testament, Talmud, etc.) patently and unambiguously read as the irrefutable, supremely perfect word of an omniscient deity; or if it seemed a whole lot more like something that was just made up and written down by a bunch of Bronze Age scribes and priests. If the latter, wouldn't the incidence of innumerable other, mutually incompatible faiths be easily explained?
).
This is why I'm not quite sure how to address you. You clearly possess some capacity to appreciate irony and to think logically, as evidenced by the above.
